Last weekend, I was making apple pies. Now, I believe that an apple pie just doesn’t taste as good unless you make your own crust.

As I was rolling out the crust, with my very cute apron on, my boys were chomping at the bit for their own dough to work with.

I had to mention the apron because it is a rarity for people to wear them nowadays, but you can find cute ones, and for these types of projects, they come in handy.

I told the boys that their batch of dough would be mixed up next. Just as I had their dough ready, my mother-in-law bopped in to say hi.

So, as I talked with her with my back to the boys, they helped themselves to about one-third of the bag of flour, got out their toy farm tractors and implements, and started flour farming!

The original intention of the extra dough was for them to do what I used to do as a kid. My mom always made extra dough when she made pie, and we would roll it out, cut it in diamond shapes, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on it, and bake it. It is a fun treat, or it can be, but when the dough has 99 more times the flour added to it than it should, it no longer can be considered dough.

The boys said it was winter and the flour was snow.

So, they had a great time. They almost looked like ghosts by the time they were done. I got the vacuum out immediately upon completion of the winter farming project.

I figure, if they can’t make a mess in the kitchen once in a while, what fun would it be to be a kid? It’s extra work for us parents to clean up, but they’ll remember it when they grow up, and hopefully will let their kids occasionally flour farm.

Kid-isms

My 8-year-old recently had novocaine at the dentist and as the side of his mouth went numb he pointed to the area and said, “Does it even exist anymore?”